With very rare exceptions, the Constitution refers to "persons" or "the people" rather than "citizens." That is, civil rights apply to everyone who comes under the jurisdiction of US law, citizens or not. The ACLU understands this; it's alarming how many Americans don't.

As a practical matter, those who think that rights can apply to one group of people but not another usually find out, quite dramatically, how wrong they are. My father, who is white, grew up in apartheid-era South Africa. Everyone knows how bad it was to be black in SA in those days, but what they don't realize is that most white people were pretty afraid of the government as well, because it had to be a police state to exercise that level of control. Once you start taking rights away from one group of people, everyone else's rights start disappearing too. History is full of examples of "privileged" groups who have gone along with tyranny by assuring themselves "it won't happen to me" -- and they're always wrong in the end.

The terrorists. The crazies. The killers.

We need to hear them. We need to know how they recruit, how they plan, how they think. They're not alien monsters. They're human beings, and we can get inside their heads.

By all means, listen to Tiller's family and friends. Their words, their memories of this fine man, are worth hearing. But unless we want more funerals, more testimonials, more vigils ... we have to listen to the ones who cause these things to happen in the first place. Ignoring them or trying to silence them won't make them go away.

Know them. It's the only way to fight them. It's the only way to keep this from happening again, and again, and again.

--

Also, let's be honest about John Brown. Abolition, unlike the hate-filled "pro-life" movement, was a noble cause, but Brown himself was a loon.

... it's self-flagellation. And the Boomers seem determined to demonstrate their mastery of both.

A few years ago, I wrote this letter to Salon:

All I know is that, as a child of one parent who was just barely a Boomer (born in 1947) and another who came just barely before (1943) I'm damned glad to have grown up in the, er, echo of the Boom. I like the world of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll my generation (call it "X" if you insist) inherited from our parents. I like the fact that I can work a respectable job with a beard and long hair and nobody thinks it's worth mentioning, that I have friends of all different races, that I can wear blue jeans everywhere, that "the church of my choice" is no church at all, that I call my boss by his first name, that I'm a liberal and a libertarian and a veteran and a grad student and straight and gay-friendly and all the rest of the freedoms, large and small, that I and others my age and younger exercise every day, all at once, without contradiction, usually without thinking about just how extraordinary those freedoms are.

This is what freedom looks like: not just the absence of foreign tyranny, but also the absence of those stifling social mores which can end or destroy lives just as surely as a bullet to the head or a jackboot in the face -- an absence, I should add, from which conservatives benefit just as much as liberals, no matter how much they may hate to admit it. And it was our parents who bought that freedom for us, for which I will always be grateful. In fact, about my only disappointment is how eager so many Boomers seem to be to sell themselves and their generation's accomplishments short; given that they're still the largest identifiable demographic group in America, that seems a sure recipe for bringing back the bad old days. That's certainly not something I'm eager to see, and anyone who doesn't see the danger isn't paying attention.

Boomers, if you want your children and grandchildren to appreciate your accomplishments and forgive your mistakes, then just shut up for a while. Please. Stop talking about yourselves as some unique, defining generation in American history (you weren't) and stop painting your parents in misty, rose-colored tones as the sainted "greatest generation" (they weren't either). Accept that you're part of an ongoing story, and that like every generation, yours was good and bad in about equal measure.

Ultimately she was the one who decided to end it, not me. I wasn't happy about her cheating, obviously, but I was willing to deal with it. (Er, as long as she stopped doing it after she admitted what she'd done ...) Infidelity in this case was a symptom, not a cause -- she wasn't happy, and chose a rather dramatic means of demonstrating it -- and I suspect that's the case most of the time. Spouses who cheat do so for all kinds of reasons, but not being happy in the marriage is probably #1.

So a marriage has as good a chance of surviving infidelity as it does any other serious stressor -- and based on my observations of couples who have made it through a cheating episode (about equal numbers of men and women, by the way) the marriages which do survive are strong, good ones afterward. Note that I'm not saying that infidelity is good for a marriage, or that Everyone Learns An Important Lesson, or anything like that. Just that it's a test, and that the couples which make it through are the ones who really do belong together.

... let me apologize for MerelyMortalMale. We're trying to get rid of him and his ilk, but there's clearly a lot of work left to do.

MMM: dude, will you just SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADY.